Prosperous Friends

Longfield’s Beauty, Maine, 2004

“Age,” Dinah said. “I don’t know how else to talk about it. I am not modern.” A remark purely true just to see her as she was, Dinah, dated as a finned car in pants she called pedal pushers. Dinah said, “I still go to bed in mascara on the chance I’ll be seen by a lover.”

The possibility that Dinah might be as unfaithful as Clive had not occurred to either woman, or so Dinah inferred from the dead air. “Does that surprise you?” she asked.“A lover?”

Isabel didn’t answer. After a while, Sally said, “Does me.”

“Oh, Sally,” Dinah said.

“Does Dad know this?” Sally asked. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“We were talking about age,” Dinah said, explaining the mascara business had to do with her horrible discovery that she had caught up to Clive in years. He had grayed, sure, but not collapsed. “Can you believe I was once Clive’s student?”

The same downturned eyes whenever Clive smiled, but he didn’t smile enough while she was a smiling idiot, a stained bone with unnaturally blonde hair. “Have you ever seen this color?” she asked.

“Your hair is white though, isn’t it?” Sally asked.

“Careful,” she said, taking a big, round ring, like a thistle, spiked, off her finger so that Isabel might inspect it.

Dinah had Isabel’s attention. “Imagine me forty years younger,” she said, and she made a doused sound of something hot hissed out.

*

Was it too early to drink? There was only the sun to go by, and the sun said, Fine! Go ahead! You must be thirsty! The summer porch was Dinah’s favorite place at any time of day in the high season. Just the high season?

“The high season depends on location, don’t you think?”

The first and only other time Isabel had eaten with Dinah had been at the Clam Box at a corner table, a room the color of wet stones, rigging, nets, markers, traps, and on the table a pot of steamers and a smaller bowl of sudsy broth and a bowl of melted butter. Steamers at the Clam Box. The stomachs, dipped in butter, insinuated themselves on the way to her mouth, ugly and lustful at the same time. Steamers for starters with Ned and Isabel Bourne.

“We were a little drunk then,” Isabel said, recalling her confession in the bathroom: I’m not the person I wanted to be. That was easy enough to say when tinkling between stalls, wasn’t it? Isabel had said it, I’m not the person I wanted to be, and Dinah had responded, Who is ever? Dinah had wanted to tell the girl then, I know and you should know. . she wanted to say, If you’re looking for someone to listen to you. . Clive liked to think he was a listener. . Dinah had wanted to say, You will be hurt — but the poor girl was already.

Now she said to Isabel that her memory of the Clam Box was of a girlish woman in a rucked peasant blouse and Chinese slippers, especially the slippers.

“I’ve always been partial to them.”

“What about espadrilles?” Sally asked. “What about me?”

“What about you?” Dinah asked and was out of the room before a rejoinder. She was going to make drinks, throw together an appetizer plate, a bowl of olives — whatever people nibbled on at this hour — maybe cookies? Maybe everything the girls had bought at the farmer’s market? By the time she came back to the conversation, Sally had moved next to Isabel so to see the bay and the blue sirens on the other side, Acadia and island sisters. From the quiet on the porch, close, sororal, Dinah inferred confessions had been made. Isabel, perhaps, had cried; her cheeks looked chapped. Onto this stage Dinah carried a tray with a pitcher of New England iced tea and tall glasses filled with ice and stems of mint. Sally fished out the mint, smelled it, bit a leaf, said it tasted dusty.

“We were talking about relationships,” Isabel said.

“Sounds deadly.”

“How much can you ask for?” Sally said. “That is the question.”

“Ask for as much as you dare,” Dinah said. “I’ve seen the future.” More than once she had taken flowers to Wax Hill. Wax Hill, where the old folk bumped against whatever was held out to smell. “Their heads are no bigger than hydrangeas,” Dinah said. “That’s right. Look afraid.”

*

Goat cheese amid the three graces. Clive wanted to paint them as they were on the porch — his wife, his daughter, his sometime little-mistress with a governess’s self-abasement. Christ, Isabel, buck up, he was thinking. He walked over to the Adirondack chair and stuck a pillow behind her back, propped her up so she could speak.

“That chair is too big for you,” Sally said, and they switched seats.

The sofa was a better fit for Isabel. Everyone agreed. He was thinking of the composition now that Isabel was visible and his wife Dinah was at her drink, and Sally, his daughter, was talking — about? He could look at them or the cheese. So very pretty! Green sprigs and purple pansies, a fanned deck of crackers, a wooden spreader. Sally and Isabel had bought cherry tomatoes and a bread called Brot, thin shingles speckled with caraway and sea salt, also smoked oysters and smoked bluefish, olives, something tan, enough food to make a dinner but this was just to start. “What can I do to help?” he asked Dinah — pro forma, he knew, but intention, not action, was what counted, wasn’t it?

“Sit,” Dinah said, and he made to when he pulled himself out of the chair.

“What’s this?” He backed away to where Dinah was sitting.

“I’m sorry!” Sally took the yarn and needles off the chair and found the basket she had come with. “Hope nothing stuck you!”

“What are you making?” he asked.

“A modest scarf?”

“In brooding colors,” Dinah said and she touched his arm, and he put his hand on her shoulder and kissed her on the forehead. “Dinah,” he said because he liked to say her name.

Clive might have said something to Isabel, but he had interrupted Sally.

“Sally has a story,” Dinah said to Clive. Then, “How do you know this, Sally?”

“I saw them kissing.” Sally pulled herself forward in the chair. “Her poor husband looks a little like Henry the Eighth; he has a beard. At least I think he has a beard. If he doesn’t have a beard, he has a pointy chin.”

Clive liked his role in the gathering; nothing was expected of him beyond sitting, which he did largely, an open-armed posture, his drink held near the floor. Summer’s ease, in a soft, clean shirt, rolled sleeves, he saw the dark ropes of his arms were a lustful seducement to any Polly to be shoved against the barn. Somewhere in the house is a hat Dinah gave him, a straw hat with a straw band and a papery flower stuck in the band. August and he is playing Pan; in Maine, in summer, he grows younger. Where was the hat from? Where was the hat? He signaled Sally to interrupt and ask Dinah if she remembered where that hat was. “Do you remember that hat from Mexico?” he asked, and he described it, the hat she had bought him from — where in Mexico?

“Which hat?” She startled.

“The straw hat with the cornflower,” he said. “You bought it for me.”

She sat up and made herself a cracker, considering hats. “The one from Mexico,” she said, “from Zihuatanejo,” and her distant face told him she was upstairs in the closet looking for the straw hat from the market in Zihuatanejo. “I haven’t seen it,” Dinah said.

“So?” Sally was looking at him, bewildered.

“What?”

“What should I have done?” she asked.

“Sorry?” he asked. Sally, holding an overloaded cracker near her mouth, what was she talking about? “I don’t know,” he said, which seemed to be the answer, because she began to eat. She ate the cracker — it looked like a hoagie — and made another, added an olive. Ate it, ate it so fast, he picked off the pansy before it disappeared, but the perky cap of the goat cheese had collapsed; it looked hot and the Brot had curled. His drink was some kind of foam. He left to find his hat; he wanted to find and wear it. He wanted to wear it enough that he would open the attic on the chance it had turned into a souvenir. Upstairs in his closet he looked to the back of the top shelf. He had so many hats! He put on the Borsalino and felt raffish: la sua era una vita fortunata.

On the curb of a street in Trastevere, a melon-shaped woman in a housedress, short gray hair and stick legs, flats — the legs and the flats he remembered because she was rocking on the curb a little; she was walking a black dachshund, a smoothy, without shape, like her. Clive had seen that woman more than once in Rome and once he had followed her, so mesmerized was he by the backs of her elbows — the joint a dark line as made with a knife in the middle of capable dough.

“How handsome you look!” Dinah surprised him.

He said, “I had forgotten about this hat.”

“Better than the straw hat.”

Dinah said all the things he had come to expect her to say; she, his greatest champion, devoted, careful, kind. How could he assuage the pinch of remorse over Isabel except to admit that what he saw of himself in Isabel’s face had been flattering, yet he had abused her. He was vain, which was a failing, except that it had kept him in motion.

In an expensive store that looked like a bomb shelter, he had purchased a sweater for Isabel; nothing in the store suited Dinah although he had looked.

Oh, no custos morum, he, but a serial adulterer — he put the worst words to it — selfish, insensitive, yet he was not ignorant of Dinah’s forbearance but grateful. “Thank you,” he said to all of her compliments. “Thank you,” he said, and he held her, repeating, “I mean it, thank you.”

The advantages of an old wife, Clive thinks, are too often overlooked in the market economy. A sensible old man is wise to hold on to a sensible old wife. The younger woman does not know that drama is wasted on an old man with cold mad eyes. He is careless of last names, often can’t pronounce them; nevertheless, the young woman thinks she is known — why? She is, as they all are, a fungible creature with the same small disasters — sometimes a story. Isabel, in New York, months ago, dinner at King Arthur’s Court, said, “I know a lot of what I do isn’t interesting but every day has its scene or two.” How he had liked her for that and her flattering appreciation of his work, of course, her appreciation of him and for such slight returns — Christ. All young women should ask for more. If he had a granddaughter that is what he would tell her. He does have a granddaughter! He forgets about Wisia all the time.

He followed Dinah into the kitchen.

“You’re not going to wear your hat?” she asked.

Not now. Now he saw the clock was pointing at the grill and whatever was planned he offered to burn it.

The menu was salad and salad, thanks to Sally, who was trying not to eat meat.

“Really?” he said, pointedly skeptical.

“Steak tomorrow,” Dinah said.

Her answer cheered him. Here was an old wife who did not change an old man’s diet even if the change was healthful. On the porch Sally was still on her haunches and eating Brot and goat cheese while Isabel was saying, “Yaddo to rhyme with shadow. I’ve never been but I know how to say it.” Isabel had met Ned at Columbia. “One night after some reading,” she said, “we all went to a bar. There was talk about the Rapture, and I heard Ned say he wouldn’t want to be a part of any group that excluded his pets from heaven.” Isabel said, “I fell in love on the spot. He was seeing someone else then. Early in the summer, when the term was over, Ned called and asked if I would meet him in California. He needed to close his mother’s estate and his plan was to drive her car across the country to New York. ‘Was I up for a cross-country trip?’ I told him my suitcase was already out.”

By the time Isabel got to La Jolla, where Ned’s mother had lived, the house was down to a crestfallen assortment of Pet’s lesser antiques and what’s known in the business as smalls, in Pet’s case, stuff that looked inherited but wasn’t — lineage in the shape of silver dresser sets and napkin rings, a horrible accumulation of tarnished utensils, pickle forks and berry spoons, sugar shakers, candlesticks, salt cellars with cobalt-blue glass liners — possessions! Ned was crazed with it all, and he called Bertita, Pet’s longtime housekeeper — Bertita, por favor! — who rolled the house into a U-Haul and drove it away.

Isabel’s work was a dashed insertion in her story. She thought of herself as. . well, she didn’t.

Clive said, “You should take yourself more seriously.”

At the table, shaking open a napkin, he saw Dinah had put cold cuts and strips of cheese near his end of the table that he might make a Cobb salad if he were so inclined. He ran four miles every day. He needed the nourishment. He never got fat. There was a blue cheese dressing on the table as well as vinegar and oil, and the blue cheese was for him.

“The strips of Swiss are Dad’s, I assume.”

“Correct,” he said, at the same time Dinah offered to cut more. “No one wants more,” he said, and he told Dinah to sit down even as she seemed to be checking off items — something missing. Dinah went off to the kitchen and Sally followed. “What’s the matter?” he called after her, and then after Sally, “Where are you going?” but Sally didn’t answer, and now he was alone with Isabel. This was Dinah’s plan probably and she had let Sally in on it so that for a while at least, Isabel would have some time alone with him and he, with her, before she left for New York, but to say what?

“Tell me about the car,” he said, “your accident.”

“I didn’t drive off the side of the road, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Then how did it happen?”

“Do we have to talk about it?”

“No,” he said. “We don’t,” and he forked salad and chewed slowly.

“I should thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“I was looking for a way to be happy.”

“You’re not saying you’re happier now, are you?” he asked, and when she didn’t answer, he repeated, “Are you?” Isabel, seated in the middle of the table, stared at the table and did not look at him when she spoke, which made him angry, unreasonably so, especially if she was happy. He could see himself, a puffed-up poisonous frog. He wasn’t happy. Fuck that.

“Look,” he said, “will you look at me?” And he leaned forward and took hold of her arm, less than gently, and she did look up, scornful mouth faintly pleased and familiar with violence, the hurting heat and the marks left behind. Her expression only made him angrier but he’d be damned. Better to back off, which he did; he took up his fork; he resumed his eating. Then almost in a way of passing, he said, “I’m sorry.” He said, “I think you are a capable young woman and deserving of a happy life.”

“Thanks,” she said, “you’ve been a good example.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“I mean it,” she said. “You’ve been straightforward with everyone.”

“You have to stand up for yourself,” he said and would have gone on, but she was crying and apologizing for crying, saying she was a mess. Always looking for someone else to shape her life.

“I’m going to go back to New York as soon as I sell the car,” she said. She told him she was definitely going to sell the car. She wouldn’t get very much; she knew that; they had told her — shocking devaluation, but the car was old to begin with. It was Pet’s car, the one Isabel drove cross-country with Ned. She said, “I don’t dare drive now. I don’t trust myself.”

Now he was interested. “You drove off the road on purpose then?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember feeling involved.”

He should have stood to embrace her, this young woman some thirty years younger — they had stopped touching each other and grown used to it when he was still painting her. An abrupt if quiet parting: He was preoccupied, she was confused, there was Ned. They hadn’t seen each other — a week or more, ten days? Once met at the post office, another time Trade Winds grocery — but not until the business with Ned had they spoken at length with any warmth, not until Ned’s leaving was there reason to meet. Now Dinah, it seems, had adopted her, Isabel Bourne — no, Stark. Isabel Stark. She did not look like a woman nearing forty; she did not look like his daughter, not the way she was dressed: Isabel in loose braids and a T-shirt, a suggestion of tits — right word for what she had, next to nothing, snotty girls on this most girlish woman. He lightly tugged a braid. “You are very sweet,” he said, “and I have been selfish. I want to make up — I should make up — with all the women in my life. So, friends?” he asked, “Are we friends?” and he put his hand over hers, lightly.

*

“Oh, Sally.” Dinah smiled to see the happy pills were working and the shaggy girl she loved was back and making her laugh until her arm weakened, and the pitcher she carried so heavy, water wagged near the spout. “Oh, Sally,” she said.

“What? I’m the mother. I can say anything.”

But what had Clive and Isabel said? What did he say to these iridescent girls in their quick sideways flights? Dinah did not care so long as he cared for her chiefly, as she did him in their daily passing, bumbly as wasps, hiving it out, makers, albeit slower. Slower? No, like the good doctor-poet of Paterson, Clive knew he was “more attractive to girls than when he was seventeen.” He took them up and put them down like a fork, as needed. The figurative paintings in June, then the fox and now, what now? “Will you show us?” Dinah asked. At the sweet end of the meal, Dinah asked again, “Will you?”

His work had not always been applauded; he had suffered and doubted. “My style lacks a champion!” Adoring young women helped as did someone else to do housework and mail, drive, and keep a calendar. Dinah had come into his life just as it was turning. Oh, there had always been yes, the yeses from a few significant others, although the lash of uninterest was the greater sensation; exclusion, the continuous drizzling misery of it, had been the weather in Clive’s thirties and forties, but then, nearing fifty, it had happened. “Trees in Bud,” “Morning from the Porch.” Could the titles have been more significant? “Rainy Afternoon.”

Now, no rain, but an awning of light under which Clive stood in the barn, not entirely certain, unveiling the lily pond. The lily pond was far from completion — purple wounds on a largely white surface — and in his expressions Dinah saw he was not entirely certain of this work. He didn’t look at it when he was showing others. “The lily pond is promising.” That’s what Dinah said.“I look forward to when it is finished,” and so saying, she saw he was relieved. He showed off the summer’s earlier triumphs. Paintings he was pleased with — he said so. She was glad to hear it.

“I look like a shrimp in that painting,” Isabel said.

“A shrimp,” Dinah said, “wedding hors d’oeuvre of choice.” She said, “I like all the angles, the different points of view,” and then no more, but she walked deeper into the soft interior of the barn expecting straw on the floor and chaff in the air, barn smells and the sudden swallow. Where was the kitten with the gummy eye, the one she had tried to catch in another such barn in another time, as a child? Isabel followed Dinah as if expectant of a story or some remarks on what they had just seen, a naked Isabel with no pubis to speak of, and all the action outside of the studio with Dinah and the garden. “I grew up in a house next to a farm,” Dinah said. “I found all kinds of animal life there — some of it alarming — once I found a dead rat the size of a dog.” By then, she remembered, the barn had already caved in and the wood had turned silvery in places, in places dark, a beautiful carcass in its long conclusion. Dinner was over; the viewing was over. “Someone should take you home,” she said to Isabel, and Sally offered.

*

Dying barns and houses, that’s what Isabel was thinking about when Sally put the farmers’-market fare, along with the box of tarts, in the backseat of the car. Watching her move, Isabel had decided that at age forty, Sally walked in a way that might seem aggressive to some — it had to Isabel — but which had more to do with Sally’s height, and was meant as a smaller approach. Nevertheless, her posture seemed abject, and once they were on the road Isabel asked Sally, “Do you consider yourself a guest at your father’s?”

“You have to ask?”

“He is. .” Isabel made a wavy gesture.

“Moody? It’s no use talking about him,” she said as if they had been talking about Clive for a long time.

Isabel was not so keen on the subject that she pressed for more but went back to the conversation about abandoned houses, the Bridge House, the barns. On the Reach Road Isabel was attached to an empty house the bittersweet had overmastered; vines seemed to grow out of rather than into the open windows, and soon it would appear like topiary in a rough approximation of a house. “I have no business staying here in Maine,” Isabel said. “I’ve got so much to do.”

“Settle back,” Sally said and she petted Isabel’s shoulder.

Settle back, Izzie was her mother’s expression, and so she did; she sat back in the dark car and wondered at the sequined glamour of the controls, the warm smell of a high-end rental rolling smoothly over a ruined road of frost heaves and no one else encountered on the road.

“You’re a careful driver.”

“No one’s ever told me that,” Sally said, “but I am glad you think so.”

Easier to lie when not looking at a person; at least, this was Isabel’s experience; it was also easier to speak intimately, to say, “I am more alone than I am used to.” She asked Sally if she would stay, if she would spend the night. By then Sally had turned onto the drive but not without responding, saying, “Well.”

Isabel said, “I’ve got extra nightgowns.”

“Really?” Sally said, sounding skeptical about the nightgowns — their sufficiency? — while at the same time following Isabel into the house and the kitchen. There Isabel set down the polished onions, the carrots, the dusky kale. The leftover tarts slid in their box.

“Would you like one?”

“Later.”

Later was a way of saying yes, and Isabel said she was glad, she was grateful. “You have no idea. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, and they took themselves out to the rough backyard to look at the moon. Sally made herself at home on the bulkhead, and Isabel sat at the back door under the light on a steep granite step. “Somebody must have had a purpose. Doesn’t it look that way?”

“Do you mean the moon,” Sally asked, “or the yard? The field grasses were encouraged, I think.”

“I think so, too,” Isabel said.

“I used to be a not-so-amateur gardener, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I’ve not worked in years,” Sally said. “I have a law degree,” she said. “Can you believe it? Surprises me, too. Law and landscaping, there’s a practical combination. It’s been an awards show of disappointments, but you must know that.”

“Honestly,” Isabel said, “your father didn’t say.” Isabel would not repeat his brusque summation of Sally: my daughter with my first wife, a heartache. He had failed to mention his daughter was attractive, forgetting Sally’s face to speak of her mother’s wrecked beauty. Sally in shadow, flat on her back on the bulkhead, was a still, consolatory shape far from the violent theater beside the door: frenzied insects bashing into the filthy light. Even the cobwebs were black. She lived here, didn’t she, hadn’t she, for more than a few weeks?

Nothing a broom couldn’t fix and she was half inclined.

“Relax,” Sally said. “Come sit next to me.”

A familiar invitation — and welcome although Isabel wondered just how much Sally knew about her, and as she neared, she said, “You know about your father and me, don’t you?” She sat at the bottom of the bulkhead with her back to Sally. She said, “I sat for him when I first got here.”

“Yes,” Sally said.

“And it doesn’t bother you? I mean it was brief — and rather one-sided, but still. . you don’t hate me?”

“You sound like my daughter,” Sally said and she rolled toward Isabel, lifted her rump and brushed off tree slough. Sat, but made herself small — if such were possible — knees pulled up, arms around her legs, hands clasped, Isabel’s posture. Sally said, “I once met someone at an AA meeting in Long Beach, California. We spent a week together and on our last night — I was visiting my dad and Dinah — she told me she knew my dad. She didn’t have to say any more than that.”

Isabel said, “I’m sorry.”

“You know, you could have a rock garden.”

“No,” Isabel said, “I could never.” Not after the snake plant, an impulse purchase she had treated poorly — even contemptuously. In the White Street loft, the snake plant stood in indifferent foyer light. Over time, the poor plant could not be soaked but the water ran through it: Isabel could lift all three, four feet of it — pick up a hempen spike and all of the plant came out of its pot in pot-shaped dirt, dry and compacted.

Isabel asked, “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” Sally said. “If you don’t know what to look for. . you need to know what to look for in a thing that’s dying to know when it’s dead.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Isabel said.

“What else have you killed?”

The shih tzu came to mind — and Isabel flinched to remember him and what she had done. The baby that never was. And G, and — but Clive? Do you want to show your husband what you can do? More than one man had asked. Now Ned had shown her what he could do — no fooling: In the few weeks at the Bridge House he was onto something his agent liked.

“I had begun to think Carol Bane didn’t exist,” Isabel said. “Why is it so hard to picture the people closest to us as succeeding?”

Sally said, “I don’t know.”

Isabel refrained from explaining herself. One day perhaps there would be occasion to describe some jobs she once took — typing Ruth Draper’s letters in Miss Wilsey’s punitively small but respectable apartment on East Sixty-eighth — but not tonight. If there were other nights maybe — probably. She had been a substitute teacher at The Spence School. She still tutored. She had some stories to tell. Also secrets. Some secrets had to do with Ned, and the possibility that he might reappear and want to play again meant she wouldn’t tell: two together sitting smugly, the solidarity of two in the midst of company. Their fantasy life together, crossing on the QE2—that game — and the invented Lime House in Hampstead, NW3, all experience delivered in such detail that the fictions seemed fact, and the facts? The facts insisted on themselves. They flew economy to London and lived in Golder’s Green in an unnamed, floridly wallpapered, ground-floor flat.

Some happiness to start there, some of it photographed, then perversely put away. In the nameless ground-floor flat in Golder’s Green, Ned and Isabel had pulled their chairs close to the plug-in coals and read and read.

“I’m not one for travel actually, but with Ned, I could go anywhere. I would. I did.”

*

“Oh, God!” Isabel with a lemon under a knife, tea and tarts at midnight, had cut deeply into her finger.

“Run it under cold water.”

“Oh, God!” She saw the blood run off, and she contracted her vaginal muscles as if it might help contain the wound. “Oh. .” The sting of it! The cut! She didn’t like the cold water and she swaddled the finger with paper towels. Meanwhile, Sally was after the first-aid kit under the bathroom sink. She came back with the gauze in hand and took up Isabel’s finger and wrapped it rapidly, efficiently, like a nurse. “I feel dizzy,” Isabel said, and Sally put an arm around her, and led her from the sink to the kitchen chair, sat her down, and finished bandaging.

“I’m taking you to the emergency room at the hospital. It’s not that late and there should be someone on duty. Where are your shoes?”

The gauze had begun to pink already.

“Keep your hand raised,” Sally said. “It’s a deep cut. You may need stitches. This is the kind of thing I would do,” she said.

Isabel found her slippers — only slightly surprised at being barefoot — let herself be led to the car, door opened, legs swung in. “Okay?” Sally said, and Isabel nodded yes, though the gauze had begun to leak, so Sally gave her the kitchen towel she had brought along in case and told Isabel to wrap it around her finger and then her hand. In this way she muffled the bite and tried to subdue the sharp memory of cutting herself. She thought of graver agonies — wounds, burns — incalculable affliction of the sort she read about every day, but the hurt did not abate. The finger was hot and it beat, heartlike hot and sore.

For the rest — the long drive, the parking lot, the waiting room, the frosty windows in ambulatory — Isabel let herself be led. She shut her eyes when the doctor took up the needle to numb the area and then a kind of nothing until she looked down and saw a turbaned finger puppet that grew sharper as it woke but safe. Sally knew her way around hospitals and did the paperwork — check-in, checkout — all the while smiling at Isabel, saying how much she liked being around someone more hapless than herself.

*

In the watercolor of the lily pads Dinah likes best, the lily pads are a congestion of greens with here and there a pink or yellow crown for flower. The sky is made of orange strokes; the white paper shows through. What time is it in the painting? Could be dawn or sunset. The pond is a party, present tense and happy, but he might very well have started painting it on one of his silent, unhappy mornings. The same was true for the nude paintings. What were his sensations when painting Dinah in the garden as seen from the studio with nakedness inside this summer in the shape of Isabel? Two summers ago, it was Caitlin with the red hair. Caitlin’s pubis is the same red, not quite a red, but an orange brown, burnt-brown triangle, very small, the hips broad invitations. Never on any of the nudes are their nipples largely, colorfully noted. A bright triangle, roughly brushed in, is the focal point of the nude model’s body. As far as Dinah’s concerned, that is. No, in truth, the dynamic element is really the color and the contrasts; the body, except for suggested sexual parts, is pink; the facial features are incidental; the young women — young women to her, to Dinah — the young women are shapes.

Some of what has happened, some of what has been written about her husband and his interviews have made Dinah cynical. His work has been described as “showing us voluptuous ease,” but also conveying “a respect for labor. . no doubt a residue of his own early years of physical toil.”

Toil? What toil to be the son of wealthy parents who have made it possible to be an artist, a figure destined to be reliant on a trust fund so that a trust fund has been provided?

How old were the kids conducting these interviews anyway?

Dinah was thirty when she first met Clive in an elective course on figurative painting. He seemed very young to be a visiting professor, but he told her that she seemed very old to be an undergraduate. “Just wise” was what she said. She had left college after her freshman year to marry her high school sweetheart and fuck and fuck and fuck with impunity before he deployed for Vietnam. The year was 1969. The baby, if indeed there ever was one, died; Dinah saw blood, and after that more blood, unbidden, clotted, black. The high school sweetheart came back, and they stayed married for two years. Why? She has knocked against this question before and had no answer except to remember why she married in the first place. His body! His body was the first place. Lolling in the school gym to see him and then to lean into his body. Talk was beside the point. The point was his long body, the combative hardness of his muscled body, and the smell of his body after running when his T-shirt was no more than a tissue she pressed her nose to. His inimitable smell! She has not tasted his like and never expected to even as she rubbed against him when they were no more than sweethearts; she knew this olfactory arousal would be forever particular to him, James, Jimmy, Jimbo Card. And she was right.

For a time her name was Dinah Card and she was married to Jim Card, who called her Dee.

Now she is Dinah Harris and nothing of her hometown is known; she writes under this name even as she writes of her hometown. The baby who never was is an informing sadness, an ink that blooms on the white sheet.

At age nine she broke her arm playing a stupid game with her best friend of the time, Cynthia. Cynthia tipped a hammock hooked up in a metal frame by sitting on the end and made Dinah climb to the top of what she called the mountain. “Climb the mountain!” Why not go to the park and play on the jungle gym? “Climb it!” Dinah slipped, her arm got caught somehow, and she fell — she was never able to explain the accident; even the game Cynthia had invented was hard to describe, but she was committed to it. Cynthia didn’t believe Dinah had broken her arm, but Cynthia’s mother believed it. “Dinah’s hardly a sissy” was how Cynthia’s mother defended her. First sensations of mortality then, the start of the ugly years and trembling, Dinah, five feet barely-something inches, feared most people, men especially. Her art teacher took her aside for more than one reason; Clive took her aside, too, but by then, at thirty, she knew what men could and could not do to women, and she was not afraid of Clive.

Weirdly fearless — adventuresome? — Dinah was the first in a high school class of fifty who dared to color her hair, and in Dinah’s case, blue streaks. She drew on herself as she did on other surfaces. She was on her way to mascara when she met Jim. Now her hands sometimes shake in applying eyeliner, and her eyes come out uneven and she thinks she looks tragic, like a French chanteuse — black pointy lips on a sad face informed by too much knowing.

Another version of Dee and Jim Card: a rusty S.O.S pad disintegrating in her hand. The sink is dry, and the refrigerator, emptied, stinks; elsewhere locked windows, old air. Who left the apartment first? No sequence but objects, scenes, his glove without its mate.

She doesn’t remember Jim’s voice though she sees him yelling at her on the stoop to their apartment. Henry Street, Madison, Wisconsin, around the corner from State Street, the center of power: at one end of State Street the university, at the other, the capitol. Politics, their politics were diverging when she thought, as lovers, she and Jim should be in accord.

Another time she came back to their apartment to find a pyre of old books from courses she had taken — an entire term on Shelley, books on Freud and books by Freud and books with dialectic in their titles — all stacked as for a purifying rite in the middle of the bare room where she and Jimbo had once done everything but cook and sleep. He left a pack of matches nearby.

The books were at the end, at least that’s how she remembers it.

But why think on the past on such a day — pink wind, timid sun — softness in all things? She is on her hands and knees on the granite terrace Clive laid out a long time ago. She is neatening up with self-abasing ceremony. Her face nearly touches the stones in sorting the weeds from the moss and fancy pussytoes.

Something else she was thinking — what was it?

At Scottie Rostow’s party, she and Jim didn’t talk to anyone but huddled, facing each other, knee to knee, arms around in a loose embrace, heads pressed together, a mourning posture, both of them glum. But a family’s history of service in the Marines is not an inheritance to squander, she learned.

Something else, this: Jim is sitting on the plank seat chair in his mother’s kitchen, senior year, track season. She practically lives at his house. She snaps the kitchen towel at his little sister and talks with his mother about him in front of him. He drinks a milkshake at ten thirty every morning. Nothing sticks to him but it turns to muscle. He is sitting on the plank seat chair and taking off his running shoes that in memory turn silvery, melted and runny. After his exertions, the muscles in his arms jump just doing little things, like taking off his shoes. He is sitting on the plank seat in a plank of light.

Clive walks carefully over the terrace, examines her work, says, “Good job.” But the ache! Her shoulders especially, she massages her shoulders until her hands cry out, please! Poor, misshapen hands, the fleshy chuff deflated, her thumbs have disappeared. When she holds out a hand, stop-sign fashion, only four fingers show.

“Look at that, will you,” Dinah says, and he does. He frowns and gives her his hand and helps her up off the pavement. The deep imprint of her knees in the foamy kneeler is a disconcerting sight — too mortal.

“It doesn’t stop you,” Clive says.

“Plainness is the beauty of aging:

cropping my hair, blotting excess,”

He breaks off from quoting her and says, “I love your face.”

“And my poems?” she asks.

“‘Transparent Window on a Complex View’” —he exhales the title as if he’s just eaten something airy. “Of course, I like the poems — I like them very much.

“. . what was solid was miraculous:

planes of light, day-old eggs on a white dish. .”

His recall for her work mostly pleases and when they come to the barn bench, he is still plucking lines, and she is listening to herself and how he hears her, and it wins her over that he knows, better than anyone else knows, the great divide between who she is and what she has done.

*

“Wait,” Isabel said, and she thumbed Sally’s cheek. “Just a little ink. Pen, I think. Okay. You’re okay. Did you sleep all right? You weren’t cold?”

“Fine,” she said. “How’s your finger?”

Isabel held up her finger, a swami heavy headed and hung over.

“Poor little fellow,” Sally said.

“Doesn’t hurt so much, just sore. Say,” Isabel said, “we’ve got those tarts left over from last night for breakfast.”

They took coffee and the leftover tarts outside, and it was then Isabel noticed the birds. She was sorry to have missed them in the first place. Sparrows by the hundreds cheeped in the shrubs enough to shake them. She walked down the hill with Sally, delighted by the gregarious birds and all that was moving and inviting from the house to the road and across the road for an uninterrupted view of Acadia, a blue symbol on the tranquil horizon. She told Sally how she often took this walk and how she liked to walk, too, in the Seaside Cemetery. If she didn’t get outside first thing in the morning, she would have trouble breathing. “True!” she said.

“I believe you,” Sally said.

*

“Should I be laughing so soon after?”

The question was how did Isabel feel about the pink sands of Bermuda and Phoebe Chester-Harris on a half shell?

“I can tell you what Ned has to wear in the tropics. I can tell you he’s unpacking some dead guy’s seersucker jacket yellowing at the collar. But will Phoebe let him wear it? That’s the question.”

Did Phoebe have a say in her husband’s clothes? The last time Isabel had seen Ben Harris was at their country house and then he was wearing Barbour or something. Ben Harris was not a thrift-store shopper. No dead man’s shoes for him. Ben Harris in Bermuda in sorbet colors, easy anywhere and with skin that didn’t burn, whereas Ned. . ah, he was such a tender baby.

The Bridge House, on a scenic road treacherously full of blind spots, was locally famous and Clive Harris, she liked to imagine, was more than locally famous, so that pillowy elements attached to Sally and, to a lesser degree, Isabel, and the women lounged with ease in an indefinitely extended summer. The queen of the meadow was nearly gone. (Weren’t the common names for flowers lovely?) The roses had rallied and there were days yet in ‘Longfield’s Beauty.’

Sally drove Isabel to the outdoor concert: African and African American choral music in the field overlooking the reach. The wind was arctic out of Canada and worsened. Isabel was wearing a ski cap; it was that cold. An old man in an overturned poncho staggered, blind and blown. The sight of him! And then the not-so-old woman in a parka wheeling her own wheelchair out of the field after shelter. The hood to her parka was tied tightly against the wind and crumpled her face, and she looked angry, though the music was full of odd notes resolving. There were upright bodies of every size everywhere, dancing. Isabel watched a toddler on legs stiff as stilts scare his mother while older children skidded around picnics or collided on purpose, fell. A boy with blond dreadlocks played on invisible bongos. He played with such passion, the music might be his, yet Isabel and Sally walked past him and nearer the larger sound of the chorus. They walked around the huddled and dancing. Someone called out, “Holly!” and Sally said, “Someone’s kid, I bet.”

“Everyone’s here,” Isabel said, though she knew no one, a few faces, but there, behind the fat woman in fleece, was Mr. Weed. Even Mr. Weed was at the concert, and Sally, seeing the skinny man on a picnic blanket, said yes, sure enough. “Mr. Weed is such a nice guy.”

Really?

“Holly!” they heard again. They saw Stephanie who worked at the post office and the lithe woman with long white hair who sold them the goat cheese at the co-op. Sally said her name was Helen Friendlander; Helen was behind the co-op’s hippie baskets from Ghana.

But where were the black faces, the migrants who picked in the blueberry barrens?

Were they Haitian, Isabel wondered, or what?

Sally said, “The Haitians pick apples and the Mexicans pick blueberries.” She said, “The Guatemalans and Hondurans are loggers. The lobsters,” she said, “are for white folks to get.”

Isabel blew into her hands to warm them although it was warmer near the prow of the chorus and Isabel was not so cold that she couldn’t stand and watch, without shivering, as an older man danced with a younger woman. They were not married; at least Isabel thought they were not married. “But why do I think that?” she asked Sally.

Sally said, “They might be anything to each other.”

They danced, this ordinary man and younger, ordinary woman. They hopped and clapped, hooked arms, and went in circles.